RingCentral Didn't Ring My Chimes

RingCentral, an app from RingCentral, is available for free at Google Play, with various monthly rate structures for the accompanying service.
I've been looking for an alternative to Google's Google Voice product that provides one
number for all my phones -- mobiles and landline -- and includes online voicemail and
discounted calling.

Google Voice is a fine product, and I've had exemplary use out of it, but it has a couple of
failings related to a lack of international functionality: You can't make cheap on-mobile
device Google Voice calls from outside the U.S., and the entire system is dependent on a
U.S. cellphone network being the carrier.

Free Trial

The no-risk 30 day trial involves paying the horrific $39.99 per month, plus tax, on
signup -- which for me (I'm located in California) would come to $51.20 down.

You can later cancel if you don't like the service.

Upon further perusal of the site, I came up with a $9.99 a month plan, prepaid for a year -- thus a
$119 outlay -- with 100 free domestic minutes per month.

Plan Details

I suffered total sensory feature overload reading about both plans. The 1,000 minute plan
included such things as Cloud PBX and free unlimited Internet fax worth a purported
$39.99/month.

The 100 minute plan offered an "Additional Free feature: Internet Fax." The 100 minute
plan tried to get me to upgrade for inbound and outbound calling.

The Hounding Begins

In fact, after an afternoon's burdensome researching of plans and signing up, I needed a
break, and luckily, because it was a holiday weekend eve, I went away.

However, during
the course of the weekend, I was barraged by two voicemails and seven emails from
RingCentral about this or that -- often trying to upsell me additional features like number
porting.

Feature Double-Talk

I won't bore you with further feature tedium. Who knows what I would get? I ordered
both plans eventually -- the $9.99 one costing me a sneaky $14.99 because I wanted
monthly billing, not annual. Add tax to that and $9.99 became $18.63 a month.

I planned to cancel one plan, if not both at this stage.

The holy grail -- that is, VoiP calls placed and received over a 3G connection as well as
WiFi -- kept me going though.

The App

The potentially complicated Android app installation onto a phone using the 1,000
minute account went seamlessly, which is unusual for something like this.

I was able to
successfully configure the call flows using the PC.

And Now: Tests

The app made good-sounding calls flawlessly over both a 3G connection, and a WiFi
connection.

The app did not receive a placed test call from another phone when the app-installed
phone was set to WiFi and the 3G radio was on -- though nonfunctioning due to an
inactive SIM card.

The call went straight to voicemail without ringing the phone or creating a notification.
The call showed in the Recent Call Log within the app as a missed call.

The app also did not receive a call when the 3G radio was fully functional and WiFi was
switched off. Again, the call went to voicemail. I double-checked the call flow within the
account setup area and believed it to be correct -- it should have rung the phone.

Other Stuff

Cool PC features include the ability to fax documents from Dropbox and other cloud
storage solutions, including Google Docs replacement Drive.

However, I did not find a
way to perform this fax documents feature using the Android phone-based app.

My Experience

Overall, I wasn't happy with the RingCentral experience. Researching international
calling rates, I discovered that RingCentral charges a non-included $0.04 a minute to call
a some overseas landline numbers (UK).

This rate compares unfavorably with Google's $0.02 to the UK with no monthly fee, and
VoiP provider Skype's $0.023 to the UK, also with no subscription.

In Conclusion

I don't doubt that with a bit more patience than I have, it would be possible to end up
with an acceptable all-in-one PC cloud-based virtual phone system that could handle
multiple employees, call flows, faxes and ultimately save money over a hard-wired phone
system.

Primarily based on single-user cost -- and the fact that the Android app that I wanted did
not ring the phone or otherwise notify me of calls and sent calls straight to voicemail --
I decided to pass on RingCentral and its app as a keeper.

Patrick Nelson has been a professional writer since 1992. He was editor and publisher of the music industry trade publication Producer Report and has written for a number of technology blogs. Nelson studied design at Hornsey Art School and wrote the cult-classic novel Sprawlism. His introduction to technology was as a nomadic talent scout in the eighties, where regular scrabbling around under hotel room beds was necessary to connect modems with alligator clips to hotel telephone wiring to get a fax out. He tasted down and dirty technology, and never looked back.